


Mother Tongue

by vanitashaze



Series: Alabanza [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: ADHD Lance, Adoption, Autistic Keith (Voltron), Bilingual Character(s), Cuban Lance (Voltron), Family is hard, Future Fic, Galra Keith (Voltron), Gen, Kid Fic, M/M, Neuroatypicals in Space, Trans Male Character, parenting, sibling relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-29
Updated: 2017-05-29
Packaged: 2018-11-06 12:27:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11036190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vanitashaze/pseuds/vanitashaze
Summary: "The trouble begins at breakfast, which means that it’s barely past six in the morning when the nonsense starts to go down, because it turns out that both Galra kits and whatever the hell Xio is have circadian rhythms exactingly tuned to ensuring that their parents never get any sleep at all."Keith and Lance's family grows by one. Parenting is hard, siblings are harder, and sometimes love isn't enough.





	Mother Tongue

**Author's Note:**

> Hover over text for translation; for those on mobile translations are also included in end notes. See end notes for an explanation of how language works in this universe and content warnings. This isn't a dark fic, but if you're easily triggered, I recommend reading them.

The trouble begins at breakfast, which means that it’s barely past six in the morning when the nonsense starts to go down, because it turns out that both Galra kits and whatever the hell Xio is have circadian rhythms exactingly tuned to ensuring that their parents never get any sleep at all.

 

Hunk has been dutifully filling in as godparent while Lance and Blue were away, running herd on Xio while Keith nursed his badly timed concussion and fished loaves of moldy bread out from under Meyzak’s bed — because that’s a thing now, Keith had tiredly informed Lance the last time they’d had five dobash to video chat, although at least she’s not hoarding food that gets horrifically gross, and he’s working on convincing her to hoard things that don’t spoil at all, like jerky. Lance had been exhausted during the call, his muscles screaming and boots full of bog mud despite his suit’s supposedly waterproof seals, but Keith had looked even worse, and when Lance had squelched his way to Hunk’s rooms after he got back in, Hunk had looked so grateful for his return that Lance didn’t have the heart to ask him to cover for one more morning, even though at this point Lance is running on caffeine pills and denial.

 

Lance gets about two vargas of sleep before his alarm shakes him awake and he groans his way out of bed like a zombie emerging from a crypt. It’s times like these that he wonders how Keith, who gets even less sleep than Lance does, has even survived this long — forget the Galra, the sleep deprivation alone should have killed him years ago. He asked Keith about it once, but Keith had just shrugged and said, “I guess trauma is good for something.”

 

“No, it’s not, the whole point is that you should be sleeping _more_ ,” Lance had replied despairingly, but it was admittedly nice to have a co-parent who could deal with late night feeding and lullabies without nodding off himself in the middle of them.

 

Keith’s not looking too peppy this morning, though. Since Hunk and his insistence on table manners are sleeping in, when Lance arrives in the kitchen Keith is eating what looks like last night’s dinner straight out of the pan it was cooked in, while Xio is munching on what Lance hopes to God isn’t another grilled cheese sandwich. His mom will never let him hear the end of it if his child gets scurvy or beriberi because Xio would rather starve than eat anything other than the same four meals.

 

Meyzak is sitting quietly, carefully drinking her juice, both hands wrapped around the cup. Out of the three of them, she’s the only one who looks like she’s been in the same room as a brush in the last week, which is actually less heartening than if she’d showed up to breakfast wild-furred with her pants on her head. No six-year-old is actually that neat, and Lance was hoping by now that she’d be feeling comfortable enough around them to let her freak flag fly a little bit, but she’s apparently still living in mortal terror that they’ll get rid of her or do God knows what to her if she displays anything mildly objectionable.

 

“Wassup, familia?” Lance slurs tiredly.

 

Xio shrieks in delight and launches herself out of her chair to greet him, but before she can make contact, Meyzak shuffles forward and reaches out to give Lance a hug. It’s barely an instant of soft fur brushing up against him before she pulls back to examine his reaction, which is probably pretty fucking shocked, because this might be the first time Meyzak has ever initiated physical contact with him.

 

“I missed you too, Maze,” Lance tells her when he regains his senses.

 

It seems to be the right thing to say, because she honest-to-God smiles a little at him, or at least twitches her mouth in his general direction, and they’re definitely on their way to a Moment and maybe even actual spoken words when she has to abruptly squish herself against the cabinets so that she doesn’t get knocked down by Xio, who’s incoming with a vengeance, slamming into Lance’s midsection like one of Yellow’s subatomic missiles. Lance groans, and Keith actually laughs, that asshole.

 

“I have so much to tell you,” Xio says, ominously.

 

“Awesome,” Lance says. “Can it wait until after I drink my weight in tea? Hey, do you want some?” He shakes the kettle at her enticingly.

 

She makes a disgusted noise. “Leaf juice,” she says, and lets him go so she can go back to eating — yep, a grilled cheese sandwich. Perfect.

 

“Do you want some?” Lance asks Meyzak.

 

She looks a little panicked at a question that doesn’t have a clear right answer, and apparently decides to split the difference by nodding and shaking her head at the same time, which just looks like she’s having some sort of spasm. Lance shrugs and pulls the fruit tea out of the cabinet for her. She seems to like fruit, and if she doesn’t like it — well, it won’t kill her. Probably. Have they tested her for allergies yet?

 

“Hey, did we test you for allergies yet?” he asks her, but she just looks at him, confused, so he turns on the kettle and scribbles down a note on the communal kitchen reminder board. Lance probably won’t remember to check the reminders, but someone will, so it’ll work out, and hopefully she won’t come into contact with any deadly allergens in the meantime. Parenting! His mom really was right about second child syndrome.

 

“When did you get back?” Keith asks as Lance bends down to press a good-morning kiss to his forehead and steal a forkful of his food. Keith completely ignores the kiss, but does try to slap away Lance’s fork.

 

“Late last night,” Lance says, “I didn’t want to wake you up.”

 

“I was up,” Keith says, sourly, although he’s very carefully not looking at Meyzak, so Lance can probably hazard a guess as to what was happening that required his boyfriend’s attention at 4AM.

 

“Maze was bad,” Xio says smugly.

 

“Xio,” Keith warns her, and then assures Meyzak, “You weren’t being bad, that stuff just happens sometimes.”

 

‘Bedwetting?’ Lance tries to mouth and mime, but Keith just looks at him in utter confusion.

 

“Are you… okay?” he asks.

 

“Papá, el agua está lista,” Xio says.

 

“No ha hervido,” Lance says, but she shakes her head, pointing.

 

“Mira, vapor,” she insists. “¡Apágalo antes de que haga ruido!”

 

“Okay, okay, bueno, no me grites,” he grumbles as he shuffles over to turn off the kettle and fix his tea. “¿Quieres jugo en vez de té?”

 

She shudders. “ _Pegajoso_. Quiero agua.”

 

“Hey, look, we raised a kid who hydrates,” Lance tells Keith. “Pass me that pitcher.”

 

“¿A donde fuiste la semana pasada?” she asks Lance eagerly. “¿Peleaste con hombres malos? ¿Hiciste explotar algo? ¿Salvaste mucha gente?”

 

“Todo, por supuesto,” Lance says, absently, but then frowns and looks up, just in time to catch the nasty smirk that Xio is shooting at Meyzak.

 

“¿Me das esa jarra del agua, por favor?” she asks Meyzak sweetly.

 

Meyzak looks at her for a moment, then turns to Keith and says something in Galran.

 

“Uh, I don’t really understand,” Keith tells her, and Meyzak looks down at her plate, something like anger flashing over her face, although it’s hard to tell. Xio, meanwhile, is openly glaring at her from across the table, tearing into every bite of her sandwich like she’s imagining it’s Meyzak herself, which for all Lance knows she could be.

 

“Okay, new rule,” Lance says. “No conversations in front of each other in languages we don’t all speak.”

 

“¡Papá!” Xio protests. “¡No es justo! ¡No es mi culpa que ella no sabe nuestro idioma!”

 

“You don’t like it, teach her,” he says. “Boom. Solution.”

 

Xio scowls and pushes herself back from the table.

 

“I’m done,” she says. “You can teach her if you care so much.”

 

“You stomp off without cleaning your plate, you’re doing all the dishes later,” Lance calls after her, but she just makes a rude gesture and marches off anyways with all the attitude that a nine-year-old can muster, which is a whole damn lot. “Fine. Keith, put her on the roster.”

 

“You put her on the roster, you’re closer,” Keith says, and Lance actually throws up his hands in despair, because having kids has apparently turned Lance into his own grandma.

 

“You’re all hopeless,” he says, and then points at Meyzak. “Except you, right now you’re my favorite. You’re done eating?” She nods. “Why don’t you go —” He racks his brain for something that will keep her occupied long enough for he and Keith to talk. “— wake up Coran? He told me he had something cool to show you.”

 

She blinks at him a few times, but reluctantly shuffles off.

 

“He did not say that,” Keith says accusingly once she’s out of earshot.

 

“No, but he’s too nice to tell her that,” Lance says.

 

He sighs and flops onto the table, thumping his head against the metal a few times.

 

“Status report?” he asks.

 

“Nightmare every night for Maze and two for Xio, three bedwetting incidents that I know of, Maze stole one of my knives and some of Xio’s toys, Xio hasn’t eaten anything but grilled cheese for the last two days, and we had four — no, five screaming meltdowns,” Keith says.

 

“Wow, fun week,” Lance says, and Keith groans, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes so hard Lance worries that he might actually injure himself.

 

“One of those meltdowns might have been mine,” Keith admits. “But at least I wasn’t around Maze when it happened.”

 

“Jeez, how did you manage that?” Lance asks. “She barely lets you out of her sight.”

 

“Red helped,” Keith says. “She locked Maze out and turned her soundproofing on.”

 

“Ah,” Lance says. “So when you say you weren’t around, you really mean that you got super upset, probably freaking her out in the process, and then left her alone not knowing what was happening to you.”

 

“I was doing the best I could,” Keith snaps, and Lance sighs.

 

“I know,” he says, “I’m sorry, it’s just — this whole situation, you know?”

 

“Tell me about it,” Keith says. “Next time, it’s my turn for a vacation.”

 

“Keith, I was hunting war criminals on foot through a bog,” Lance reminds him.

 

“Like I said,” Keith mutters.

 

“Hey, the Spanish stunt that Xio did this morning, has she pulled that before?” Lance asks.

 

“No, but now that she knows it works, get ready for it to be a regular play,” Keith says glumly.

 

“We should have had a stupider kid,” Lance says. “Why did we educate her again?”

 

“Maze should learn Spanish,” Keith says.

 

“You should learn more Galran,” Lance says.

 

“You should learn _any_ Galran,” Keith shoots back.

 

“Why bother?” Lance says, flatly. “She only talks to you.”

 

“Only because everyone keeps pushing her off on me,” Keith says angrily. “If anyone else actually bothered to make an _effort_ —”

 

“Oh, don’t start,” Lance says tiredly. “I’m making an effort, we’re all making an effort, she’s just decided that you’re her lord and protector because you’re the only other Galra around.”

 

“I don’t even understand _why_ ,” Keith says, frustrated. “It was the Galra who did all that shit to her, those fucking experiments, why doesn’t she want to be as far away from me as possible?”

 

“Probably because those same Galra were telling her for her entire life that if we ever caught her, we would roast her in the oven and eat her for lunch,” Lance says. “Or worse, knowing those druid fuckers.”

 

“When Alteans go bad, they go _bad_ ,” Keith agrees.

 

“Hey, so what’s on the schedule today?” Lance asks, desperately trying to change the topic. He’d prefer to postpone this particular fight for a time when he doesn’t still have bog mud in his hair, thanks, and blessedly, Keith goes along with it, shrugging helplessly and telling him, “I honestly have no idea.”

 

“Wow,” Lance says. “You really must be exhausted, because I’m pretty sure you wrote it.”

 

“I think Xio is down for on-planet social time but Allura said something about the Castle being called out to… somewhere, but I don’t know if we’re actually going anywhere or she’s just in talks,” Keith explains. “But I guess we are going somewhere, ‘cause we’re moving now.”

 

“The Castle isn’t moving,” Lance says.

 

“Isn’t it?” Keith asks. “Must be me. I thought the Castle was spinning a lot for a straightforward jump.”

 

“Please go lay down before you drop dead,” Lance begs him, and cuts him off when Keith starts to protest. “Five dobash! Look, Maze is with Coran, Xio can entertain herself. It’ll be fine.”

 

 

*

 

 

It is not fine. Coran can be a masterful storyteller when he wants to be, but apparently Meyzak is one tough audience, because she shows up outside Keith’s bedroom about fifteen dobash later and wedges herself against the closed door, like if she tries hard enough she can phase through it to get to him. For some reason, overwhelming guilt doesn’t lend itself well to Keith falling asleep, because he gives up as soon as he figures out that she’s out there and lets her in. Lance has a brief moment of hope that they can bond through nap time instead, but Keith also does not fall asleep when people are staring at him with their glowing eyes, and Meyzak seems to have no interest in doing anything as unsafe as falling asleep because, as Keith has informed Lance, “they can get her” if she’s asleep, and even though Pidge already assured him that they killed all of the druids quite thoroughly, Lance kind of wants to go back to that base and kick all their corpses.

 

Keith ends up going for a walk with Meyzak around the Castle corridors — surprise! They _are_ traveling today! And even if they weren’t, Meyzak freaked out the one time they tried to take her off the ship — in hopes of tiring her out so that her body just will not stay awake anymore and she’ll nap, even though Keith will pay for that tonight. In the meantime, Lance works his way through about ten pots of tea and ten million after-action reports, because the bog people document everything obsessively and they really do need these for the legal proceedings they’re bringing against the war criminals he just spent a week tracking and tranqing and dragging back to his transport through the mud, because it wouldn’t be right to just shoot them in the head, oh no, these people don’t want revenge, they want _justice_.

 

It’s an admirable sentiment, he supposes, and he’d be more on board if a) he hadn’t personally witnessed some of the things that said war criminals were going to be on trial for, and b) the bog people would pony up any of their own forces for an assist, instead of contacting Allura for help and then just dumping Lance in the bog to do their dirty work — literally — like the paladins of Voltron were some sort of galactic war criminal pest control service.

 

They had specifically requested the Red Paladin — why, Lance doesn’t know, and it’s probably a good thing that they didn’t get him, because Keith would have just blasted all the criminals’ asses out of the mud and called it a day, if he had been willing to leave Meyzak to do it at all, which was doubtful at best. Keith has managed to avoid getting called out for paladin duties since she came to live with them, but it looked like he really wouldn’t be able to get out of this one, because the whole galaxy was speculating that he was dead — and then he had concussed himself in a stupid bedside table accident (HOW) and the bog people got the Blue Paladin instead, who was really the only paladin with the tracking and shooting skills they needed anyway. They were pretty upset when he arrived and not Keith, but boo fucking hoo.

 

“You’re very bitter about this,” Pidge observes as Lance angrily works his way through another fucking form.

 

“I just caught-and-released a bunch of monsters who might actually get acquitted for the mass slaughter of civilians and I’m pretty sure I’ve got mud in my unmentionables,” Lance snaps. “Bitter doesn’t even begin to cover it.”

 

Pidge hmms a little and adjusts their glasses, and Lance suddenly wonders about those war criminals’ chances on trial after all. Lance doesn’t have the organizational skills to be devious, Shiro has scruples, Allura has principles, Keith is about as subtle as a car bomb, and Hunk is genuinely a good, kind person who believes that people will do the right thing if they’re given the chance. Lance adores Pidge, they’re family, and he wouldn’t say that they’re cold or heartless or anything — but Pidge fills in the gaps. Pidge is calculating, and level-headed, and understands that sometimes rules need to be bent or even broken if the system is rotten enough to begin with. Pidge has Ways.

 

“You know, you would probably make a great criminal mastermind,” he tells them.

 

Pidge beams. “Oh, I know, but thank you for the validation,” they say.

 

Xio drops by a few times while he’s working. Today’s schedule has apparently been shot to hell so he’s not sure what exactly she’s doing when she’s not with him, but he finds himself rapidly wishing that she’d do more of it, because she’s still in a bad mood and misery just loves company. Instead of doing something helpful — like not being here so he can get these stupid things _done_ — she walks around the table and Lance in endless circles and angry-mutters about balmera to him until she decides that she’s done and wanders off, only to come back less than a varga later and do the same thing all over again.

 

Normally he’s interested and engaged when she info-dumps — or, okay, he’s interested and engaged during some of them and tries not to tear his hair out during others, because he wants to encourage her enthusiasm and passion but some of the things she finds interesting he finds so. fucking. boring., but he can usually throw Keith at those — but today it’s just distracting as hell. He can’t make sense of what he’s reading, he’s got the beginnings of a bad headache, he keeps making even more mistakes than usual and then having to go back and correct them… After he fills out the same form for the fourth time, he reaches his limit.

 

“Xio, normally I find you talking about space whales really cool, but today I’m kinda busy,” Lance tries to explain. “I need to get these done and I can’t concentrate on them and listen to you at the same time. Why don’t you go tell your dad about all this new stuff you learned? I bet he’d be interested.”

 

“Dad is with _Maze_ ,” she says, and kicks Lance’s chair for emphasis.

 

“Then go hang out with Hunk,” Lance says, although he doesn’t know what Hunk’s doing or if he’s awake or if he’s even still on the ship.

 

“Hunk is _boring_ ,” Xio whines. “ _You’re_ boring.” Kick.

 

“Yep,” he agrees tiredly. “Very boring. Extremely boring. What about godparent #2?”

 

“Shiro’s the _most_ boring,” she says. Kick.

 

“Pidge?” he tries. “Allura? Coran?”

 

“Boring, boring, boring!” she says sourly. Double kick.

 

“Xio, seriously, kick your own chair if you want, but this one is mine,” he says. “Since everyone is apparently boring today, just choose the least boring one. Hint: it’s not me.”

 

“I _can’t_ , he’s with Maze,” she says angrily. Kick.

 

“What’s wrong with Maze?” he asks.

 

“Boring!” she snaps, and storms off, which — fine. Whatever. It won’t kill her to entertain herself for one morning while Lance finishes these and Keith tries to get Meyzak to sleep.

 

“Go read more about space whales!” Lance shouts after her. “We’ll talk at lunch!”

 

 

*

 

 

According to the chore roster, it’s Keith’s turn to deal with lunch today, but Hunk volunteers to take his slot in deference to the fact that Keith looks like he was run over by a truck and then backed up over a few times just to be sure. Galra don’t visibly bruise — something to do with the chemical makeup of their blood, which is apparently different from humans’ and just one more reason why Keith and Xio are gifts from the universe and Lance is never, ever having another bio-kid with him again — so it’s hard to tell when they’re tired or hurt or anything, really, which is a terrible combination with Keith’s difficulties in telling when he’s any of those things either, but his ears are drooping miserably, and he keeps nodding off and then jerking himself awake.

 

“What do you want for lunch?” Hunk asks him. “Happy to make anything, I slept in and you look like you could use some comfort food.”

 

“Speed,” Keith says, flatly. Lance is only 50% sure that’s a joke.

 

“Sorry, not enabling you to become a tweaker,” Hunk says. “But we still have some of the fish you like, that sautés pretty quickly.”

 

Keith gives him a tired thumbs up and then flops back down onto the table, head pillowed in his arms.

 

Lance is technically supposed to be working as Hunk’s sous-chef, but he’s dealing with other problems. Meyzak’s coordination isn’t great, given her age, and they’re back to cups with lids after she spilled juice all over herself during morning snack, but the lid that Lance is trying to force onto the cup is refusing to pop on even though he swears it’s the same lid and cup that they were using with no problems last week, it’s the right color and everything, why the fuck is it not working?

 

“Papá, cuéntame más sobre tu semana," Xio starts.  “¡Vamos! Tus historias son las mejores y todo aquí ha sido tan _aburrido_ …”

 

Lance mutters, barely listening,“Just hold on, Xio, I have to get this — stupid, fucking —” and he fights and swears at the juice cup for a full five dobash with Meyzak staring at him before he realizes that it’s the right color but the wrong size, they have different sized cups, _why_ , and then he manages to spill juice on himself before he gets it into the stupid fucking medium-sized cup for her.

 

Behind him, Xio is rapping angrily on the metal tabletop, blunt fingernails hitting a rhythm that may be soothing for her but is quickly driving Lance up the wall, a feeling not helped by the suspicion that she’s choosing an annoying stim on purpose, since she usually doesn’t even _like_ tapping on things and she’s been watching Keith’s every twitch with an air of vengeful satisfaction. She’s probably just cranky and overdue for lunch, Lance thinks, maybe a little bored after she tried to pull Keith into a conversation about balmera earlier and he just looked at her blankly and then flopped back down onto the table, but when he turns back around from the juice cup she looks seriously pissed, even worse than at breakfast; there’s practically steam coming out of her ears.

 

“Xio, stop tapping, please do something different,” Keith begs. “It’s so loud.”

 

She starts rapping louder, with her knuckles this time.

 

“ _Xiomara Aurelia_ ,” Lance says.

 

She glares and stops rapping on the table. And then she starts rapping on her chair.

 

Keith moans a little under his breath. Lance’s head is aching, and it’s barely noon.

 

“Hey, Xio, how about fish?” Hunk asks. “No herbs this time, I promise.”

 

“Grilled cheese,” she snaps.

 

“Xio, come on, remember how I told you about scurvy?” Lance says. “You like fish. Please, eat the fish.”

 

“Grilled cheese!”

 

“Again?” Hunk asks despairingly.

 

“At least try to sneak some vegetables in,” Lance mutters to him.

 

“No vegetables!” Xio shrieks, and Keith winces hard, flinching away from the sudden outburst of noise.

 

“Okay, I have been patient,” Lance tells Xio, “I have been _so_ patient, but there is a place where my patience runs out and you just reached it.”

 

“I don’t care!” she yells. “You suck!”

 

“Xio,” Lance snaps, “seriously, enough,” but Xio isn’t deterred, because she raises herself on her tiptoes to bellow at him over Keith’s head, “You suck, you suck, you suck, you suck —”

 

“Well, you’re my kid, so I guess you kinda suck too, huh?!” he snaps back, even as Hunk says, “Whoah, dude —”

 

“No I don’t!” she yells. “I bet you stole me like you stole the freak! I can’t be yours because I don’t suck and you do, you do, you do, youdoyoudo!”

 

“Wrong!” he yells back. “You came out of me, I think there’s even video footage around here somewhere!”

 

“I don’t care, I hate you!” she screams.

 

“Hey, no—” Keith starts.

 

The lack of sleep headache that’s been building at the base of Lance’s head all day is throbbing now, spikes of pain shooting through his right eye every time Xio screams. He has no idea what her deal is today, but he needs it to be _over_ , he’s so fucking tired and Keith is looking like he wants to dive for cover or start yelling himself, with faster and faster unhappy-rocking that says he is quickly approaching Absolutely Done With This Situation, but Lance is already there, he’s done with this entire week and this morning and whatever Xio’s deal is today, he’s so done, stick a fucking fork in him, while Hunk is entreating everyone increasingly loudly to Just calm down, guys!!!! and in the midst of all this, nobody notices Meyzak clutching her cup full of juice, trying to make herself as small as she can and edge her way around an increasingly upset and flailing Xio, and then Xio steps backwards and a lot of things happen very fast.

 

Xio knocks into Meyzak, who drops her cup, and the lid goes flying off, splashing them both with juice. With an enraged scream, Xio whirls around and punches Meyzak right in the stomach; trapped against the cabinets with Xio towering over her, Meyzak snarls and lashes upwards at Xio, claws out and going straight for the face. Xio manages to throw her arm up in time to shield her eyes, and Meyzak’s claws gouge into her arm instead, sharp enough to draw blood, and Xio falls backwards onto her ass. They stare at each other for one crystalline second, wide-eyed and horrified, and then Xio wails and Meyzak sobs and both of them take off running in opposite directions, while all three supposed adults in the room just stand there like idiots, frozen in shock.

 

“What the _fuck_ ,” Lance says, and then he and Keith finally scramble into action.

 

“You take Xio, I’ll take Maze,” Keith shouts, and Lance nods even though Keith’s already sprinted out of the kitchen to catch Meyzak before she wedges herself somewhere dangerous in her panic.

 

“You want help with Xio?” Hunk asks Lance, but Lance shakes his head.

 

“No, I think this might be a dad situation, not a god-dad one,” Lance says. “Thanks, though — and thanks for everything this week. I hear it was one for the books.”

 

“Your family is a mess,” Hunk agrees. “Good luck.”

 

Even though all his dad instincts are screaming at him to go to his child, _now_ , resolve the situation _immediately_ , Lance gives it a few minutes and then takes off after Xio at a walk rather than a run. A Meyzak freakout is an immediate defcon one, but Xio isn’t a danger to herself when she’s upset unless she feels trapped, and the last thing Lance needs to do right now is trigger that by running her down like a gazelle. She has big feelings, even by a nine-year-old’s standards, and just like her other dad, she usually needs some space to think about things before she can calm down enough to talk about them.

 

Also just like Keith, she’s pretty predictable in where she goes to think, and a quick chat with the Castle over one of the video screens dotted through its corridors confirms his suspicions.

 

Now that Lance is back with Blue, the lion bay is dark and quiet, electric lions dreaming of whatever electric lions dream of while their ventilation systems whirr softly. As he steps into the bay, Lance can hear the sound of nanobots working, and occasionally a swarm will skitter into view — repairing the lions’ tiny micro-tears, nudging jostled parts back into place, occasionally sending up tiny showers of sparks. There’s a lot of them clustered on Blue today, a whole shimmering mass of them encircling her snout.

 

He used to think they were creepy, scuttling around in the dark like a mob of spiders, but now he kind of likes them. In their own way, they care as much for his lion as he does.

 

As busy as they are with the other lions, there’s not a single bot on Red. She’s crouched between Black and the back wall, staring straight at the door that Lance just entered through, and although her lights aren’t on, he picks up on awareness from her anyway, a ghost of that uncomfortable scrutiny that he’s felt from her the few times he’s connected with her through Keith. All the lions have their own feel, and after more than a decade of forming Voltron, Lance knows them all pretty well. Blue is friendly and playful, the moment before a snowball fight, cold water on a hot day. Red is the judgment of a predator who’s deciding whether or not to eat you.

 

She has a glaring soft spot for her paladin’s child, though, even if she’s still not too keen on her paladin’s boyfriend, and her hatch is open. Lance can hear sniffles and rustling inside. Figuring that Red probably won’t chomp down on him if he tries to go comfort her beloved kid, he gingerly makes his way up her gangplank until he gets to the cockpit, where Xio is huddled in the pilot’s chair with her face pressed against the fabric.Probably trying to smell Keith there, Lance realizes.

 

“Hey, Spawn,” he says softly, and she jerks upright and growls at him, but the effect is somewhat lessened by the hiccup halfway through.

 

“Go away!” she shouts, voice echoing painfully loudly in the metal cockpit.

 

“Nope,” Lance says, popping the ‘p’. “I respected your space and all so that you had time to process, but some shit went down back there, so now we gotta figure out what went wrong so we can fix it.”

 

She scowls and actually turns around to present her back to him, but she doesn’t seem like she’s going to fly off the handle now if she isn’t left alone, so Lance just sighs and drops into the passenger seat, steeling himself to wait for whatever she clearly wants to say to trickle down to the place where she can actually say it, and tries not to fidget too loudly while he waits.

 

“You’re going to miss dinner,” she tells him, after a while.

 

“Pretty sure that Pidge is making weird bird thing,” he says, and she shudders. “Yeah, I know, same.”

 

She presses her face harder into the pilot’s seat and doesn’t respond.

 

“I’m sorry for losing my temper,” he tells her.

 

“I’m not,” she mutters into Red’s upholstery.

 

“You should be,” he says. “You really scared Maze.”

 

Xio mumbles something that sounds suspiciously like “fuck that”, which Lance chooses to ignore; clearly today is a day for picking his battles.

 

“Gotta say, kid, when you asked about siblings, I didn’t realize it was so you could practice your combat skills on them,” Lance says.

 

“Why are _you_ here?” she demands.

 

“Uh, because I love and care about you?” Lance tries.

 

“I don’t want _you_ ,” she says significantly.

 

“Too bad,” Lance says. “Keith is with Maze and Shiro is out with Allura and you exhausted Hunk, so I’m the parent you got today, okay?” but this seems like the wrong thing to say, because she screams a little and grinds her face into the seat and doesn’t respond.

 

“Hey. Mi amor. Háblame,” Lance says, gently. “No te puedo leer la mente, necesito palabras. Inglés o Español, no me importa, cualquier idioma, el que sea más fácil. ¿Qué pasó?”

 

“He hates me,” she mutters.

 

“Who does?” Lance asks, bewildered. “Hunk? He doesn’t hate you, he’s just tired of making grilled cheese.”

 

“Not _him_ ,” she says, like Lance is being a total idiot.

 

“Your dad doesn’t hate you either,” Lance guesses, and apparently he guesses right, because she unsticks her face from the seat at that. “Seriously, how did you get that idea?”

 

Xio scowls mutinously and doesn’t say anything. He tries to reel her in for a hug, but she slaps his arms away, curling into herself miserably, and Lance waits her out while he silently prays for patience. Jesus, he thinks, how did his mom ever deal with six of these.

 

“She sucks,” she finally says.

 

“Well, that’s illuminating,” Lance says, and she scowls at him.

 

“She sucks a _lot_ ,” she elaborates, like that’s supposed to be any clearer.

 

“Why?” he prompts.

 

“Because she’s a Galra,” she snaps, clearly trying to distract Lance by picking a fight. Rather than rising to the bait, Lance gives her a look, and she huddles a little further into her ball of misery, angrily gnawing on the necklace that Keith got her so that she’d stop chewing on herself, and finally bursts out with, “Dad belongs to her now and he doesn’t like me anymore and it’s not fair, I was here first, it’s not fair, it’s not fucking fair!”

 

“First of all, people do not belong to other people,” Lance says. “Second of all — what?”

 

“I hate her,” Xio hisses. “She’s _stealing everything_.”

 

“She’s not stealing everything,” Lance says automatically as he tries to figure out what the hell she’s talking about, and then gives up and just asks. “Okay, kid, you’re going to have to walk me through this one, because I’m really lost.”

 

“She steals my stuff and she steals Dad’s stuff and Dad likes her more than me but it’s only because she’s _purple_ and I’m not,” she says.

 

“Cariña, he doesn’t like her more than you. I don’t even think that’s possible,” Lance says. “He doesn’t even like me as much as he likes you.”

 

“He said so,” she insists.

 

“He said that he likes her more than he likes you?” Lance asks.

 

“He said that he loved her,” she says. “Yesterday. Right in front of me,” she adds darkly.

 

“Love isn’t a finite resource,” he points out gently, even as part of him wants to start laughing. Xio reads above her age level, she loves it when people use big words with her, and although it took her a while to start talking, now she won’t shut up, fluent in English, Spanish, and Altean, even has some Hawaiian Pidgin and Japanese. Even child genius Pidge is impressed with her maths. His kid is so smart that it bowls him over, except when she’s being a total jealous idiot.

 

“Yes it is,” she insists. “Dad doesn’t have enough for both of us. She has to go.”

 

“Whoah,” Lance says, suddenly not amused at all and furiously trying to backpedal, “nononono, no one has to go anywhere, there’s plenty of your dad to go around. Jesus, kid, you sound like you’re planning to push her out of an airlock. _No airlocks,_ ” he says when she looks slightly speculative at that. “No murdering your sibling. And hey, why aren’t you fighting over me? Don’t I rate?”

 

“No,” Xio informs him. “She likes him more than you. I don’t have to worry about you.”

 

Well, Lance thinks, nothing like your children to knock your ego down a few pegs. It’s nothing he didn’t know already, but it’s still pretty fucking unpleasant to hear it out loud.

 

“Maybe she does like your dad more,” he admits. “But mi amor, you have to remember, she hasn’t been here with us long, and she’s still really scared, okay? Keith understands that better than I do. He understands her better than I do. That’s why she likes him more, why he’s been the one helping her the most.”

 

“But he understands _me_ ,” she insists, slightly wild-eyed, and Lance is maybe starting to get the shape of this thing, and it’s bigger than he thought.

 

“Hey, so how much time has Keith spent with you this week while I was gone?” he asks. “Without Maze around?”

 

“None,” she spits, “I spent the whole week with _Hunk_ ,” like he’s a hair in her food, which is unusual to say the least, because Hunk is fun and loving and permissive and he takes her swimming and plays along when she pretends to be a balmera, and that’s when Lance’s brain has a record scratch moment so loud he can almost hear it, and he rapidly mentally rewinds and then plays back the last few weeks, because clearly he’s been missing something important here about his first kid in all the stressing over his second one.

 

And Jesus, there has been _so much_ stressing. Whoever says that adopting an older kid instead of an infant is easier is so full of shit that farmers could use them for fertilizer, and Meyzak is… a special case. The weeks since she came to live with them have been a whirl of sleeplessness and research and the terrifying helplessness of trying to be parents to a strange kid who was hurt so badly that she’ll never really recover, a strange kid who won’t even talk to Lance — and Lance knows that they haven’t even hit the worst of it, really, because sooner or later Meyzak is going get it, that they’re not like the people she came from, and then start testing how far that will go.

 

Keith has been bearing the brunt of all of Meyzak’s attachment issues with unusual grace and patience — although maybe that shouldn’t be super surprising, considering how many attachment issues the guy has himself — but it’s been hard on him, Lance knows, and not just because Meyzak wakes up six times a night, so Keith wakes up six times a night, because for the first few weeks whenever Lance tried to take some of that on she just hid from him. More than anything else — _literally_ anything else, even more than torture, Lance has seen that — Keith hates being helpless, and he throws his all into fixing whatever is wrong, even in situations where he really can’t.

 

Sometimes that stubbornness works miracles. See Shiro. More often it just leaves him with bruises and a wounded, wordless anger that Keith doesn’t know how to process, shaking through it in Lance’s arms.

 

And that’s gonna happen, Lance realizes suddenly — soon. They’re right on track for a burnout, because Keith has been dealing with Meyzak in his usual way, giving everything he has and then some, and worse, Lance has been letting him — because she was hard, because it felt hopeless, because it hurts to be constantly rebuffed when you really are trying, hurts to try to love a kid who very clearly has no interest in loving you back. And they had both assumed that Xio would be fine, because she had been the one to set them all down this path by asking about siblings.

 

Sure, she can be self-centered, in the way that all kids are, and she’s not always the greatest at identifying and dealing with all those big feelings of hers in a non-explosive way, but she’s smart and self-assured and they love her so much. Lance thought she knew that.

 

“So it’s possible that your dad has been ignoring you a little,” he admits. “Nah ah ah, let me finish! _Not_ because he doesn’t love you anymore, or he likes Maze more, or even because she’s purple and you’re not. It’s because he can help Maze feel safe here, in ways that I can’t, and she needs a lot of help right now.

 

That’s what families do for each other,” he emphasizes. “They help each other, even when it’s hard or not very fun.”

 

“Why do you want to be family with _her_?” Xio fumes. “She’s scared all the time and she never talks and she’s _boring_.”

 

“Hey, you used to be pretty boring, too,” Lance says. “When we first met you, you were sticky and smelly and never did anything but yell. And you got way cooler.”

 

“I’m the coolest,” she agrees.

 

“Exactly,” Lance says. “You’re the coolest, and it’s a heavy title. You gotta live up to it. That means that you have to protect people who aren’t as cool or strong as you, and that means being nice to Maze and learning how to share your dad, and eventually she won’t need him as much as she does right now.”

 

Xio harrumphs a little.

 

“You were the one who wanted a sibling,” he points out.

 

“That was a mistake,” she says, darkly, but she sounds a little less like she wants to murder Meyzak in her sleep, which is a step in the right direction, Lance supposes, if not the epiphany of sisterly love that he was hoping for.

 

“Buck up, kid,” he advises. “You’re not going to get rid of her.”

 

“We can’t just put her back?” Xio asks hopefully, and Lance thinks about the druidic laboratories where Pidge found Meyzak and everything since, the nightmares and food hoarding and stealing and silence; about every ugly part of the world that he tries to protect Xio from that Meyzak already knows in brutal detail.

 

“Definitely not,” he says.

 

Xio huffs out a frustrated sigh.

 

“I want a hug now,” she informs him, and he duly opens his arms so that she can come over and snuggle into him, even though it’s a tight fit with both of them squished into Red’s passenger seat.

 

“I still don’t like her,” she says.

 

“You barely know her,” Lance points out. “Just give her some time, okay?”

 

“She clawed me,” Xio whispers into his chest, and he hugs her a little tighter, trying to focus on giving her some of the deep pressure she likes instead of wondering just what the hell he and Keith have gotten them all into.

 

“It was pretty scary, huh,” he says, and she nods, barely a whisper of movement against him.

 

They’ve tried to protect Xio as much as they can, but some things are inescapable when you live the lives they do. Her parents are paladins, and she grew up under the shadow of this endless grinding war; she’s seen things that kids probably shouldn’t, even been in the Castle when it was under attack, and has frequent vivid nightmares about the bad people coming to steal her or kill her family. Meyzak is tiny, quite literally the runt of her litter, and Xio is much stronger than her, but Lance knows from experience how frightening it can be to have a Galra lash out at you unexpectedly, even if said Galra is someone you know. There’s a lot of reasons that he and Keith still don’t share a bed, but Keith’s tendency to surface from nightmares snarling and swinging is a big one.

 

“It wasn’t okay that she hurt you,” Lance tells her. “It was scary, and dangerous, and Keith is talking to her right now about it.”

 

In all honesty, Keith is probably focused on coaxing Meyzak out of whatever cranny she’s hiding in this time and convincing her that they’re not going to hurt her for what she did, but that’s not what Xio needs to hear right now. And they will talk to Meyzak about it, Lance promises himself — make sure that she knows that she can’t use violence to solve her problems, like he’s read happens sometimes with kids who have C-PTSD, although the likelihood of that talk backfiring and setting them all back in the trust department is way too high for Lance’s liking.

 

Even with research and good intentions — and after today probably counseling, he thinks, _again_ — Lance still isn’t sure that they can pull this off. They’re hardly the most experienced parents — or, like, the most functional adults themselves — and Meyzak is a lot even without taking into account Xio and Voltron and everything else. But Xio had wanted a sibling, and no one they approached had wanted the obviously traumatized Galra kid, so he and Keith had talked it over and decided that they would take her on, for better or worse.

 

After all, Keith had pointed out, look at what a mess they were when they had Xio, and she’s turning out alright, recent stomach-punching aside.

 

“We know all this change at once has been hard on you. But try to use that big brain of yours, okay?” Lance says, tapping gently on Xio’s head. She scowls, but doesn’t try to worm her way out of the hug. “Think about it from her perspective. She’s used to people hurting her, and now she’s in a new place with a bunch of strangers asking her to trust them, and then one of them yells at her and hits her. I’d be freaked out and claw them too.”

 

Xio looks a little guilty now. Good.

 

“So if we were to take away some lessons from today — which we will, because you’re a smart kid and we both know it — what would those be?” he asks, trying to sound conversational instead of condescending, although judging from the eye roll he doesn’t quite succeed.

 

“If I have too many feelings I leave instead of hit or yell,” she recites, and he gives her the fist bump of validation, which she returns with no small amount of embarrassment and pity. Somehow, in her eyes, of her parents, Lance is the uncool one, which he used to feel upset about but now gleefully embraces. Adolescence is gonna be great.

 

“And?” he prompts.

 

She chews on her necklace a bit more, but finally says, “I should be more patient with her and remember that she’s messed up and stuff.”

 

“Eloquently put,” Lance says. “Also, most importantly, your dad loves you _and_ likes you just as much as he does Maze. We both do.”

 

She nods, but still looks doubtful.

 

So, they’ll keep reminding her that she’s not doomed to be the eternal second banana, and call up their old counselor for some recommendations, and in the meantime they’ll probably need to have to address this in a more structured way too, now that they know it’s this big of a problem. Maybe they can incorporate a special Xio Varga into Keith’s schedule, do something that she likes, give her a little control and routine to help her deal with the wet mess of feelings that she’s obviously working through right now.

 

It’s one thing to want siblings in the abstract, but it’s possible that Xio didn’t actually realize having them would require sharing her parents’ attention. She’s gonna have to get used to it, but it’s still got to be pretty shitty for a kid who doesn’t really like change and was used to being the center of her parents’ world.

 

She stays in his arms for a few more ticks before wiggling out.

 

“You’re done?” he asks, and she nods.

 

“Yes,” she says.

 

“Good, because you need to go make an apology and I’m speechified out,” he tells her. He unfolds himself from the seat, rather less gracefully than she had, wincing at all the little twinges that tell him that healing pods are starting to not make up for over a decade of wounds and wear. “How’s your arm?”

 

“Hurts, but okay,” she says, and duly presents it for inspection. It’s stopped bleeding, and the cuts aren’t deep enough for stitches, thank God, but they should still probably clean it out and slap a bandage on it if they can, although adhesive patch bandages don’t work for a girl who’s basically a very small Sasquatch.

 

“If we bandage your whole arm, will you rip the bandage off?” he asks her.

 

“Yes,” she says matter-of-factly.

 

“Liquid bandaid it is,” he says, and tries to remember if Meyzak is up to date on all her shots, or if that even matters in this situation. She’s an alien, not a housecat, and he’s pretty sure that she doesn’t lick herself. Keith doesn’t, but he’s not flexible enough even if he wanted to. He’s going to stop thinking about this now. Maybe he should ask his mom about the shots; none of his siblings have claws, but he’s pretty sure that at least one of them has bitten another one. Actually, that might have been him and Yanitse.

 

“Hey, promise me that you’ll never bite Maze, okay?” he says, suddenly worried. Xio didn’t get her dad’s claws, but she did get his canines.

 

“I won’t,” she says. “She’s all furry and I bet she tastes bad.”

 

“You’re furry too,” Lance says. “And you routinely roll in dirt.”

 

“And that’s why I have my chewing necklace,” she says. “Because I’m gross.”

 

“That’s you,” he says fondly, “my gross kid — who I love just as much as I love your sister,” and the look he gets says that she sees what he’s trying to do and she isn’t buying it, but too bad, it’s true, so he’ll just have to keep repeating it until the day he dies and even after, and maybe she’ll eventually get it into her head that he really does mean it.

 

 

*

 

 

Pidge does in fact make weird bird thing for dinner, which Keith, Xio, and Lance respectively beg out of on account of texture, taste, and refusal to eat anything that poops on its own head. Meyzak, Lance notices with some surprise, doesn’t object when Pidge offers her a plate, and she eats her entire portion in quick, small bites, hunched over her plate even they’re all careful not to be behind her when she’s eating. Maybe she’s just eating whatever anyone puts in front of her, but they’d also offered her the leftovers that Keith was eating and she took the weird bird thing instead, so it’s possible that they just witnessed an honest-to-God Maze Choice, which would be enough for Lance to break out the cake and balloons if he thought it wouldn’t freak her the hell out.

 

Xio refuses Pidge’s offer of bird, but Hunk does coax her into eating a little alien sweet potato salad he had stashed in the fridge. It’s still one of the foods on the vanishingly small Xio-Approved Meal List, but at least it’s not grilled cheese, and the version Hunk makes has some vegetables. Small mercies.

 

It’s an awkward dinner, to say the least. After her talk with Lance, Xio had duly marched down to Keith’s room and shouted at Meyzak through the closed door that she was sorry for punching her, and then Keith’s voice crackled through the door intercom, saying that Maze had told him she was sorry too (doubtful, Lance thought, but whatever). Everybody’s hypothetically calmed down now, but the seating arrangement still deliberately separates the kids, with Hunk blocking Xio’s view of Meyzak and Allura at her elbow to be suitably impressed by Xio’s description of whatever move she mastered in training lately. (They’re not preparing her to be a child soldier or anything, but the structured physicality of martial arts gives her an outlet for the excess of energy that gives even Lance a run for his money.)

 

Meanwhile, Meyzak sits between Keith and Shiro in a spot Lance had dubbed ‘the PTSD hot seat’, given its position against the wall with good sight-lines for both doors and a clear escape route to one without having to clamber over any furniture. Usually Shiro claims that chair, but since Meyzak arrived he’s been gracious enough to shift one seat over, and Allura got rid of the sideboard that crowded his new path to the door.

 

Shiro’s mind has gotten a lot better over the years, and long term exposure to Galra-fied Keith has helped with the flinching every time he sees something purple moving out of the corner of his eye, but he seems slightly bemused and unsettled by Meyzak, like his brain is still trying to decide whether or not to be triggered by her. Lance really hopes that it eventually comes down on the side of ‘not triggered’, and not just because he doesn’t feel like peeling their esteemed leader off the ceiling. They have a lot in common, Shiro and Meyzak, in ways that might be better left alone, but also might be healing for both of them — and if Lance ignores how sad they make him, they also look really funny together, Shiro’s muscled six-plus feet against teeny-tiny stunted Meyzak, who barely clears two and a half feet and has to use a booster seat to reach the table.

 

Lance was bracing himself for more nonsense, but Meyzak has reverted to her usual silent self, her body language deliberately submissive and nonthreatening, and Xio ignores her, happily chattering with Allura and Hunk in between bites of space potato. Beside Lance, Keith seems relieved too.

 

There’s no screaming, no insults, no nasty looks, and thank God, no hitting. Xio talks to him in Spanish at one point, but he’s pretty sure it’s out of forgetfulness, not malice, because she reverts back to English when he reminds her that not everyone here can understand her. Keith does have to confiscate a handful of weird bird thing that Meyzak shoves in her pocket, but true to what he told Lance, he rummages in the cabinets until he can give her a foil-wrapped snack bar to hide in her room instead. She accepts it with her usual blankness, and then Lance announces that they’re doing Earth movie night even though they had planned no such thing, because the idea of Xio and Meyzak with three unstructured vargas between dinner and bedtime today fills him with terror.

 

They’re going to watch _Lilo & Stitch_ tonight, he decides, even if Xio and Meyzak have to watch it on their own separate couches with everyone else running interference. It’s a great movie — secretly one of Keith’s favorites, although he still won’t admit it. Also, Lance is trying to drive home a point.

 

Meyzak shakes through the first fifteen minutes, fine trembles running through her and making her fur stand on end — oops, Lance thinks as he watches Stitch be referred to as an abomination and rampage through the scientific facility where he grew up — but she calms down by the middle, and by the end she seems almost happy, maybe, if that isn’t just a trick of the light. Xio does her usual movie thing, reciting half the dialogue under her breath while she chews on her necklace and squirms against Lance’s side, occasionally reaching across his lap to shove down his bouncing leg — “Stop it, you’re distracting me,” she whispers; “If you get to stim, I get to stim, too,” he hisses, “you’re getting spit all over my shirt,” and then they both get loudly shushed by Shiro — and by the end she’s yawning more than she’s mumbling.

 

Things blow up, ohana means family, Elvis montage rolls, and Lance nudges Xio awake and mostly vertical while Keith helps Meyzak hop off the couch and crouch-walks awkwardly so that he can hold her hand as she shuffles off to bed. It would be easier for him to just carry her, she barely weighs anything, but she responds badly whenever anyone picks her up off the ground, which is to say that she disassociates hard and Keith nearly goes into a panic-induced shutdown himself at the sight of her blank, staring eyes. Lessons have been learned.

 

Xio would probably love to still be carried everywhere, but as Lance has informed her, she’s too big now, unless her idea of a fun ride is a fireman’s carry.

 

All in all, he thinks as he checks Xio’s teeth and then sends her back to brush them _again_ , why do you make this so difficult, you have a special toothbrush and everything, it feels less like the storm has passed over and more like they’re in the eye of the hurricane — but after today, he’ll take it.

 

“So how was Maze?” he asks Keith, after they finish putting their weird and messed-up children to bed and regroup in Keith’s room for their parenting post-action report.

 

“Scared, terrified, retraumatized, regressed about twenty trust steps backwards, take your pick,” Keith says, and Lance winces.

 

“She at least knows we’re not going to use her as live target practice in revenge, right?” Lance asks, and Keith throws up his hands and half-shouts, “Who fucking knows?!”

 

“I’m sorry I lost my temper,” Lance says, and Keith pokes him hard in the chest.

 

“You’d better be,” he says, but he sounds more tired than angry at this point. “What the fuck happened with Xio, anyway?”

 

“Apparently she’s being neglected,” Lance tells him.

 

Keith snorts and says, “Come on, bullshit,” but Lance shakes his head and insists, “No, really.”

 

“She’s just being a brat,” Keith argues, but he looks worried. Nine years of being a parent has done a lot to assuage Keith’s terror that he’s going to fuck it all up with Xio, but of the two of them, Keith is still the more intense parent, showering Xio and now Maze with fierce and total devotion — which is kind of the problem.

 

“She’s nine, and she feels what she feels,” Lance says. “She has us all to herself and suddenly we’re dropping her like a hot potato to focus on this stranger. I’m not saying that she’s right,” he says hurriedly when it looks like Keith wants to argue. “But… well, she’s a little right.”

 

Keith sighs heavily.

 

“Are we sure the Castle doesn’t have cloning technology?” he asks. “Because I feel like we could use about ten of us right now.”

 

“Ten of you, maybe,” Lance says. “You’re both their favorite. That’s what Xio was upset about today, by the way, that you told Maze you loved her. She thinks you’re planning to ditch her because she’s not purple and we got the newer model.”

 

“Wait, she doesn’t think that we’re replacing her with Maze, does she?” Keith asks, horrified.

 

“Yep, she does,” Lance tells him. “And she’s decided to fight for what’s hers, i.e. you.”

 

Keith groans and flops backwards onto the bed, apparently so that he can grab a pillow to smother himself.

 

“You’d better not suffocate yourself and leave me a widower with two kids,” Lance tells him.

 

“We’re not married,” Keith mumbles into the pillow.

 

“So my mother keeps reminding me,” Lance says sourly.

 

“Seriously, though, think of how peaceful Heaven would be,” Keith says, muffled. “No screaming, no punching, no waking me up in the middle of the night. No jealousy. No more grilled cheese.”

 

“Yeah, because it’d all be down here with me, asshole,” Lance says. “Also, what makes you think you’re going to Heaven?”

 

“I’m pretty sure just this week would qualify me for sainthood,” Keith says, but he does take the pillow off his face so that he can look anxiously up at Lance. “You really think that we’re neglecting Xio?”

 

Lance shrugs. “Not _really_ ,” he says. “But we raised a love hoarder. Anything less than absolute adoration feels like neglect to her, because she’s not used to sharing, and Maze needs —”

 

“A lot,” Keith finishes. “Yeah.”

 

“Xio and I had a long talk today and I think we made some progress,” Lance says. “Well, she’s not going to push Maze out of an airlock any time soon, at least, but I consider that a win. But we probably do need to institute a more structured system of Keith-sharing. A minimum of one Xio Varga a day, or something.”

 

He sighs. “And I need to spend more time with Maze without you around. She may like you more, but I’m not going anywhere, I _want_ to be here, and she needs to get used to that.”

 

 _And so do I_ , he thinks.

 

“Add us as categories to the chore roster,” Keith says dryly, and Lance flops down on the bed beside him, hoping to grab a few dobash of snuggles-sans-kid before the next crisis inevitably hits. Keith reels him in and nuzzles into him a bit.

 

“Okay,” Keith says. “I’ll do a daily Xio Varga, you do a Maze Varga.”

 

“That is gonna be one quiet varga,” Lance says.

 

“You’ll think of something,” Keith says, and presses a kiss to the top of Lance’s head. “You always do.”

 

“Can you have a Lance Varga somewhere in there?” Lance asks plaintively. “It doesn’t even have to be every day. Once every three days. Once a week.”

 

“I’d rather have a Nap Varga,” Keith says, but they do manage to enjoy ten dobash together before the door alarm beeps and Meyzak’s anxious face appears in the door videoscreen, and Keith sighs and gets up to deal with whatever horrific trauma has caused problems tonight while Lance tries to find his underwear and reminds himself that he wouldn’t trade his kids for the world, or even for a few solid nights of sleep.

 

 

*

 

 

Pidge beats Lance to breakfast the next morning, leaving behind a bowl soaking in the sink like a glass slipper on the palace steps, but he uses his awesome detective skills (Castle life sign scans) to track them down to the showers instead. After a few towels thrown at his head and a lot of yelling about boundaries no matter what bits they may share, not to mention appropriate times to ask them for favors, they grumpily acquiesce to take a look at the list of ebooks he wants from Earth.

 

“Promoting the gay agenda, I see,” Pidge says as they run through the titles.

 

“I don’t know what kind of childhood you had where Winnie the Pooh was a gay icon,” Lance says, “but I’d like to make it very clear that while red crop tops are great, the honey is just honey, and not— anything else.”

 

“Ew,” Pidge says. “I was talking about Frog and Toad, dumbass, but thanks for that mental image.”

 

They scan the list, frowning. “Why do you even want these? They’re way past Xio’s reading level.” Then they snicker. “Are you going to start reading Keith a bedtime story?”

 

“That would be hilarious, but no,” Lance says. “They’re for Maze.”

 

“Lance, you are aware that the books you asked me for are in Spanish, right?” Pidge asks. “And that even young kids don’t pick up language like pollen spores? She’s not going to understand what the hell you’re saying.”

 

“Wrong!” Lance says. “Or, well, right, but wrong in the long term, because this is all part of my brilliant plan.” He ticks his points off on his fingers. “They’re books with simple, positive emotional messages and consistent characters; almost everything happens in the same tense; once you describe the animals, they don’t have a lot of weird Earth vocabulary; and there’s cartoon adaptations of all of them, in English and dubbed Spanish, including three Soviet movies about Vinni Pukh which I _will_ make you watch with me because they’re fucking great. These books are ideal vehicles for entertaining a child _and_ teaching them another language. I’m a genius.”

 

“You’re not a genius,” Pidge says, but they do look a little impressed.

 

 

*

 

 

Pidge’s magic Earth data connection works fast, and so when the only-slightly-dreaded Maze Varga rolls around that afternoon, Lance feels as prepared as he’ll ever be, which is to say not very prepared at all, but at least he has _La oruga muy hambrienta_ to back him up.

 

Keith takes pains to explain exactly to Maze what’s going to happen, and then Lance explains it to her as well, because Keith is terrible at explaining things, but Maze is clearly as anxious at letting Keith out of her sight as Xio is ecstatic to have him to herself for a whole entire varga, although Lance bets there’s going to be some attempts at timeshare renegotiation as that varga rolls to a close. After Keith and Xio tromp off — to go _flying_ , Xio informs him excitedly, because they raised a little adrenaline junkie and apparently the combination of whoosh and Red humming at the exact right frequency makes Keith and Xio both go bonkers with sensory delight — Lance is left alone in the common room with Maze on the couch, silently staring at him in a way that manages to be resigned and suspicious at the same time.

 

It’s enough to be pretty off-putting, to be honest, and Lance can feel his confidence start to be sucked out of him, like dishwater down a garbage disposal, but he’s a real live adult who’s faced down the worst this galaxy has to offer and can definitely handle rejection from a six-year-old, no matter how he might feel at the moment, so he rallies and sits down on the floor below her, pulling out the shatterproof tablet that he asked Pidge to dig out of storage.

 

“I guess you don’t want to talk with me yet using Universal, and I don’t speak any Galran,” he starts. “But I figured I could talk for the both of us until you feel like you want to chat, too, so I brought you your own tablet with some books on it. Uh, stories that are written down.”

 

Lance waves the tablet at her. He still has no idea what things she has a frame of reference for and what concepts are alien to her, growing up the way she did; so many things he still trips over, expecting a step and finding only air. She doesn’t know how to read, he knows that much. At least medical scans indicate that she hears just fine.

 

“But these books aren’t in English — the language that the Castle translates for you guys. They’re in Spanish, my native language, the one that Xio was speaking yesterday morning. I thought you might like to learn it so you can talk with us.”

 

She blinks at him.

 

“I’m gonna hope that’s a yes,” Lance says. “Let’s see, we have: a book about a hungry bug, a book about a bear and his friends, a book about a mouse and his friends, a book about a frog and a toad who are friends and maybe gay lovers… Uh, they’re all books about animals from my home planet, but we have plenty of others if you don’t like these. Which one do you want to start with?”

 

He hands her the tablet reader, showing her how to flip through the ebook library. Unsurprisingly, she just stares at him instead of choosing — clearly waiting for him to give up and show her which one he wants — but even if it takes her a while to process things, make her own decisions, he can go at her speed; he snuck his favorite fidget toy into his pocket for that exact purpose.

 

After a few minutes, she flips back to _Sapo y sepo son amigos_ and cautiously presents it to him.

 

“Gay frogs,” he says. “Cool.” He settles more comfortably into his slouch against the couch and angles the tablet so that she can see the illustrations. “You won’t understand what I’m saying at first, okay? But I’ll translate as I go, and we can watch the cartoons, and anyway, I think that Spanish is the best-sounding language to listen to even if you don’t understand it. Much better than English. English sucks.”

 

He settles into his best storytelling voice, sends up a little prayer that she’ll actually get anything out of this, and begins:

 

“Sapo subío corriendo por el sendero a la casa de Sepo. Frog ran up the path to Toad’s house. Llamó a la puerta; nadie contestó. He knocked on the front door; there was no answer…”

 

 

*

 

 

As promised, the movie that night is _Sapo y sepo son amigos._ Xio announces that she’s seen it a million bajillion times, even though she’s seen it maybe twice, and then she watches it again anyways, albeit while doing laps around the room with an energy that makes Lance envious and aghast at the same time. Fuck, he really is getting old; time was he’d do twice that just to get through a single episode of something, much less an entire movie, and now almost all of his fidgets are done sitting down.

 

At least she isn’t going after Meyzak or anything. At one point, she even points at Meyzak to get her attention and then at the screen and says, “That’s Sa-po, and _that’s_ Se-po,” pronouncing them slowly and deliberately — no shit, Sherlock, Lance thinks, you don’t have to be so condescending, and then he belatedly realizes that those two words sound really similar and Meyzak might not have actually known which one was which, so Xio might be taking their talk seriously after all. He gives her a fistbump the next time she passes by him, which she grudgingly returns.

 

Most of the other adults made themselves scarce after Lance announced the movie, but Coran is sacked out on a chair in the corner, snoring loudly, enough to make Keith squirm and then put on his comically oversized headphones and turn on the subtitles. Keith didn’t used to react to certain noises as strongly as does now, but Lance figures that was probably conditioning and stubbornness, not true ease. Keith actually lets himself be bothered by things these days, instead of shoving the feelings down into that place inside him where his sword-swings come from. It’s good for him. It’s good for all of them. Lance is less worried that Keith’s anger is going to fry his brain like an egg before he hits thirty-five, and he and Lance still bicker, but there’s less of an edge to their fights, and they come back to each other quicker and sweeter in the aftermath.

 

If Meyzak is having any sensory issues, she doesn’t show it. She sits quietly next to Keith through the entire cartoon, hands in her lap, her gaze never leaving the screen. Lance pretends to watch the cartoon too, but he sneaks as many looks at Meyzak as he can without being creepy. Her face is as blank as ever, but he can see her eyes moving, following Frog and Toad on their adventures through their kind, simple world, where the worst thing that can happen to a person is never getting any mail. Lance’s mother tongue flows throughout it all, melodious even in the ridiculously deep voices that all Spanish male voice actors have, and he sinks into the sound like it’s the sun-warmed sea, rubbing the fabric of his jacket between his fingers to the rhythm of his silent prayers, one eye on Meyzak and the other towards the heavens as he asks the Virgin to please, please help them do this. Help them not fail each other, or Xio, or this child that they’ve brought into their home, desperately betting that she wants to be here with them.

 

He hopes that she’s listening. He hopes that Maze is, too.

 

 

*

 

 

The bed shaking alarm connected to his intercom goes off unexpectedly sometime in the wee hours of the next morning and Lance flails awake, half of him instantly in crisis mode and the other half still asleep, simultaneously trying to untangle the headphone cord that he’s managed to wrap around his neck and figure out what disaster the paladins are needed for this time. It takes him an embarrassingly long time to realize that the noise he’s hearing over his intercom isn’t Shiro or Allura yelling at him to wake up and get to the lion bay, stat, but Keith’s voice just repeating, “Lance. Lance. Wake up,” in a tone Lance would describe as less panicked and more peeved.

 

“I’m up, I’m up, what’s happening?” Lance mumbles into the intercom.

 

“Not an emergency situation,” Keith says. “But I need you in my room. Now.”

 

“Is this a booty call?” Lance asks. “I’m not saying I won’t come over if it is, but we’re gonna have to talk about your timing.”

 

“It’s not a booty call, idiot, why would I wake you up for sex at four in the morning?” Keith demands. “It’s a dad call. Hurry up. And bring your glasses.”

 

Lance grabs his reading glasses, wraps himself up in his blanket like a burrito, and blearily teeters through the dark common area of their we’re-a-family-who-all-want-their-own-space-sized suite, dodging shoes and toys and nearly breaking his neck tripping over the pile of clean laundry he dumped on the floor yesterday to fold and then forgot about. The light is on underneath Keith’s bedroom door, and when Lance fumbles the door open, he’s greeted with Keith awake and settled cross-legged on his bed, and next to him, sitting cross-legged herself, is Maze, clutching her new tablet.

 

“I guess she had a nightmare, because she woke me up and then kept showing me her tablet. I think she wants someone to read to her?” Keith says. “I told her you did the voices better.”

 

Lance blinks at him, surprised, and then at Maze, who’s actually on the bed and not hiding underneath it.

 

“He’s right, I’m way better at the voices,” Lance says, voice hoarse with sleep. “Do you want me to read to you? Is that okay?”

 

She regards him for a moment, then shifts minutely on the bed so that Lance has room to sit next to her.

 

“What do you want me to read?” Lance asks. “Hey, what about _La oruga muy hambrienta_? The art on that one is really pretty.”

 

She hands him her tablet, already queued up to a book. It’s _Sapo y sepo son amigos_.

 

She stares at Lance expectantly, and he and Keith share a look over her head. They don’t have a lot of couples’ telepathy moments, but Lance can tell that they’re both suddenly having a horrible premonition that all four of them are going to be spending a whole lot of time with Frog and Toad and their beautiful gay friendship in the near future.

 

“ _Sapo y sepo_ it is,” Lance says. “Okay, ready? Comfy? Cool?”

 

She nods, and he puts on his glasses, trying to blink away the last vestiges of sleep so that he can see the words. Across the bed, Keith is settling in, clearly steeling himself to stay awake through the whole story. Lance wants to protest, tell him to go back to sleep, that it’s okay — but, well, it isn’t. One afternoon of Frog and Toad isn’t enough to make Maze be comfortable being alone with Lance at night yet; hell, even willing to be in the same room as him at night is new.

 

So, baby steps. Patience. They’ll do this tonight, and maybe they can slowly phase Keith out, give him earplugs and see if it’s enough for him to be in the same room as her, even if he’s dozing — and hopefully, eventually, she’ll pass Keith by completely and come straight to Lance’s door in the middle of the night instead, asking him to read the nightmares away.

 

“Bueno. Okay. Sapo subío corriendo por el sendero a la casa de Sepo,” Lance begins. “Frog ran up the path to Toad’s house.

 

Llamó a la puerta; nadie contestó. He knocked on the front door; there was no answer.

 

— ¡Sepo!, ¡Sepo! — gritó Sapo — despierta. Toad, Toad, shouted Frog, wake up.

 

¡Ha llegado la primavera! It is spring!”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Author’s note on language: I had no idea how the translation on the Castle worked before I wrote this fic, and after writing it, I still don’t, but I definitely don’t want to imply that English is the universal space language. For purposes of this fic, I guess the translation technology takes intention into account or something — if you’re just speaking to speak, it comes out in Universal, but if you’re trying to speak a particular language, it comes out as that (whether Altean, Galran, Spanish, or English). I dunno, polylingualism is a thing in space, Alteans and Earthlings can understand each other instantly upon first contact but Pidge has to study Altean, just run with it. I'm also not a native Spanish speaker, so, uh... run with that too, please, and feel free to correct any mistakes I've made.
> 
> Content warnings for a brief moment of (mostly accidental) violence between young children, a parent losing their temper and yelling back at a child, and brief reference to past repressive conditioning of an autistic child.
> 
> More prominently — while never going into specifics, one of the subplots of this fic is Lance and Keith adopting a child who has C-PTSD due to significant trauma, including emotional, physical, and medical abuse, and exhibits many of the behaviors that children develop to cope (food hoarding, stealing, selective mutism, disassociation, learned helplessness, etc). I like to think that this is an optimistic fic, but it’s not always an easy one.
> 
> Translations:
> 
> “Papá, el agua está lista,” Xio says. [Papa, the water is ready.]
> 
> “No ha hervido,” Lance says, but she shakes her head, pointing. [It hasn't boiled.]
> 
> “Mira, vapor,” she insists. “¡Apágalo antes de que haga ruido!” [Look, steam. Turn it off before it makes noise!]
> 
> “Okay, okay, bueno, no me grite,” he grumbles as he shuffles over to turn off the kettle and fix his tea. “¿Quieres jugo en vez de té?” [Okay, okay, don't shout at me. Do you want juice instead of tea?]
> 
> She shudders. “Pegajoso. Quiero agua.” [Sticky. I want water.]
> 
> “Hey, look, we raised a kid who hydrates,” Lance tells Keith. “Pass me that pitcher.”
> 
> “¿A donde fuiste la semana pasada?” she asks Lance eagerly. “¿Estabas peleando con hombres malos? ¿Hiciste explotar algo? ¿Ahorraste un montón de gente?” [Where did you go last week? Were you fighting with bad people? Did you blow up anything? Did you save everyone?]
> 
> “Todo, por supuesto,” Lance says, absently, but then frowns and looks up, just in time to catch the nasty smirk that Xio is shooting at Meyzak. [Of course, all of that.]
> 
> “¿Dáme esa jarra del agua, por favor?” she asks Meyzak sweetly. [Pass me the water pitcher, please?]
> 
> ....
> 
> “¡Papá!” Xio protests. “¡No es justo! ¡No es mi culpa que ella no sabe nuestro idioma!” [Papa! That's not fair! It's not my fault that she doesn't know our language!]
> 
> ....
> 
> “Papá, cuéntame más sobre tu semana pasada,” Xio starts. “¡Dale! Sus historias son las mejores y todo aquí ha sido tan aburrido…” [Papa, tell me about your week. Come on! Your stories are the best and everything here has been so boring...]
> 
> “No Español, ¿recuerda?” Lance mutters, barely listening. [No Spanish, remember?]
> 
> ....
> 
> “Hey. Mi amor. Háblame,” Lance says, gently. “No te puedo leer la mente, necesito palabras. Inglés o Español, no me importa, cualquier idioma que sea más fácil. ¿Qué pasó?” [Hey, my love, talk to me. I can't read your mind, I need words. English or Spanish, I don't care, whatever language is easiest. What happened?]
> 
> Sapo y sepo son amigos [Frog and Toad Are Friends]
> 
> La oruga muy hambrienta [The Very Hungry Caterpillar]


End file.
